Any good government should learn from the mistakes and the successes of its forebears: in this case, after the defeat of the Empire, the New Republic should have copied the successes of the Old Republic without copying the mistakes that allowed Palpatine to take control so easily. The Old Republic, mired in controversy and stalemates, was easily manipulatable and powerless to stop its own corrosion, even though it was easily seen by every party involved. When all of the supplementary material for The Force Awakens was launched, I was shocked to see that the story of the New Republic was closely mirroring the story of the Old Republic. Stuck in a stalemate, the New Republic couldn’t decide how to move forward in terms of dealing with a shadowy organization that posed a pretty clear threat to it. I was afraid that we were seeing that the New Republic hadn’t learned the lessons it should have from the Old Republic and might prove itself to be in just as bad a place as the Old Republic.Bloodline seemed to explore the New Republic more critically, from Leia’s point of view, asking: what can a stagnant governing body do? For Leia, the answer was rebel against her own government…again. Which lessons did the New Republic not learn, and fail to learn so disastrously that Leia had to leave that which she helped create? And did their failure to learn these lessons make the New Republic worse from the start?

Legendary Adventures: Lost Tribe of the Sith:
I’m not sure who decided that we, as the collective Star Wars fandom, were this interested in Old Republic era Sith. The movies gave us Maul, Tyrannus, Sidious, and Vader. Okay, not too many. Even the early Legends didn’t seem to invent new Sith. Then Kevin J. Anderson rolled around and we started to hear about The Tales of the Jedi. Nowadays, if you attach Darth to a vaguely mean sounding word, you’re almost guaranteed to have accidentally guessed the name of a Legends Sith. Talk about overload. Not only that, but the first five books in the Legends timeline are all about Sith in The Old Republic and Red Harvest, the prequel to the zombie-Deathtroopers novels. The Sith were literally never my favorite part of the Star Wars mythology. I was enamoured more with Thrawn and Daala and the more military aspects of the stories than the excess of Sith. I knew this would be a long slump for me, and boy was I right.